Maintaining mission critical databases on our pitchfork wielding
brother, the “Daemon” of FreeBSD, seems quite daunting, or even
absurd, from the perspective of a die-hard Linux expert, or from
someone who has not touched it in a long time. The question we
ask when we see FreeBSD these days is “why?”. Most of my
own experience with FreeBSD was obtained 10-15 years ago.
Back then, in the view of the team I was working on, a
custom compiled-from-source operating system like FreeBSD 5.x or
6.x was superior to a Linux binary release.

Package managers like YUM and APT were not as good. They
did not always perform MD5 checks and use SSL like today’s
versions. RedHat wasn’t releasing security updates 5 minutes
after a vulnerability was discovered. Ubuntu didn’t exist. Debian
stable would get so very old before receiving a new version
upgrade. FreeBSD was a great choice for a maintainable, secure,
free open …

In this post, I’ll provide an example USE Method-based performance checklist for
FreeBSD, for identifying common bottlenecks and errors. This is
intended to be used early in a performance investigation, before
moving onto more time consuming methodologies. This should be
helpful for anyone using FreeBSD, especially system
administrators.

This was developed on FreeBSD 10.0 alpha, and focuses on tools
shipped by default. With DTrace, I was able to create a few new
one-liners to answer some metrics. See the notes below the
tables.

Once upon a time I did an operating system upgrade, a
minor one that should do no harm, but just get me up to date by
fixing any bugs in the version I had been using. It seemed like a
good idea.

All seemed to be fine. I use a package provided by an external
vendor and not the one produced by the operating system provider
as this vendor provides a newer version of the package and I need
that. The vendor has to make his package fit in the os
environment his package is built for and normally does a pretty
good job.

I use automation to build my systems and when I built a new one
some issues appeared. Related to the new version of the OS the
provider had enhanced one of his packages and the installation
pulled in new dependencies. The install of the external package I
use then broke as it conflicted with the new dependency provided
by the OS. While a workaround is possible: uninstall …

Again, I have moved to a new hosting provider after my free-tier
with Amazon
EC2 expired. As usual I was looking for a good VPS
provider with a decent price, providing good support and in
particular a provider supporting FreeBSD, my favorite
OS for server (for desktop I still prefer GNU/Linux.)

This time I have carefully reviewed many options and have finally
settled with RootBSD, one of the reputed VPS hosting providers
if you are choosing FreeBSD as your server OS. One of the
prime reasons for choosing FreeBSD is its performance, stability
and the FreeBSD ports system.

I had a very strange problem concerning my Ruby on Rails
installation, using FreeBSD, nginx, Unicorn and God.

When starting god from the command line as root, everything
worked. However, as soon as I placed the god command into
/etc/rc.local or a even service file in /usr/local/etc/rc.d, god
didn’t start the Unicorn server but showed exit code 127 for
“bundle exec unicorn -E production -c config/unicorn.rb”.

So I added a log directive to the god configuration and looked at
the log file. It said:

env: ruby1.9: No such file or directory

Then I changed the god configuration to include /usr/local/bin in
the PATH and now everything works. Here my configuration file:

You can now find MariaDB 5.2 in your ports tree in FreeBSD. Check out
ports/databases/mariadb. Its currently at
MariaDB 5.2.4 and the package maintainer will continue updating
it as new releases are made. Naturally the documentation in the
Knowledgebase has been updated to reflect this.

Ever since
Sun Microsystems agreed to acquire MySQL back in 2008, there has been a fair bit of
uncertainty and chaos surrounding the world’s most popular
Open Source database. With many big names in the MySQL community
pulling in different directions and the recent Oracle /
Sun acquisition, the choice of which Open Source database to
use is now easier than ever – PostgreSQL. …

I spent the last month taking a break from Open Source, partly
due to FreeBSD 7.1 failing to hit the FTP servers as
scheduled (any excuse), but mostly due to Santa’s early delivery
of Ableton
Live. Not really Open Source I may add but extremely cool
nonetheless and a much needed break from coding!.

I find that staring too much at code can hamper the creative
process (hehe), and as you know Creativity and Innovation go hand
in hand with Open Source Software!.

Speaking of which, while I have been busy playing with waveforms
and elastic audio, the Open Source world has been all guns
blazing with cool releases like MySQL 5.1 GA, …

There’s remarkably little information online about using MySQL on ZFS, successfully or not, so I did
what any enterprising geek would do: Built a box, threw some data
on it, and tossed it into production to see if it would sink or
swim.

I’m a Linux geek, have been since 1993 (Slackware!). All of SmugMug’s
datacenters (and our EC2 images) are built on Linux. But the
current state of filesystems on Linux is awful, and …

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